


A Parting Gift

by LookingForDroids



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-12-01 22:06:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20913683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: They’re not friends, but Melanie has an offer to make regardless, and Jon has a choice.Set post-Episode 155





	A Parting Gift

**Author's Note:**

> Incidentally, Jon’s line about the study being wrong is based on this:
> 
> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
> 
> I don’t think the new interpretation provides evidence for (or against) free will either, but it’s an interesting read.

Melanie doesn’t want to think about the walls of the Institute closing in around her one last time, so she takes a moment to fix her mind instead on freedom, and Georgie waiting outside, doing her this favor – letting her make her choices, staying close to help her back to sunlight after. Ordinarily, she could find her way out on her own, even in this newfound dark; this place gets into your skull, burrows down through conscious thought and into muscle memory, so deep she isn’t sure she’ll ever be rid of it. But she was always good at her job, even when she was a professional ghost hunter, and the problem with being very good at finding what she was looking for is that she doesn’t know quite what state she’ll be in when she’s finally done here.

_Might as well get it over with,_ she thinks, and reaches out. The handle of the office door is cool and metallic in her hand. 

Jon will be in there, of course. From what she’s heard, he doesn’t often leave. She can imagine him sitting behind that desk, lifting his head to look at her before the handle even starts to turn. She turns the handle anyway, and steps through, and the first thing she says to him is, “Look. I don’t like you.”

It’s still the truth, mostly, even if liking did stop being the important thing long ago.

“Well. Thank you for that piece of information,” he says. His voice is dry – the brittle kind of dry, thin and tired even through the shield of sarcasm, and she thinks she’s glad she can’t see his face.

“I’m not sure,” he adds, “that I could have reached that conclusion indep– ”

“Shut up,” she tells him. She knows how quickly this could all go wrong, if she lets him speak. One of them needs to be in control, and it’s going to have to be her, and anyway, if she doesn’t get the words out now, she never will. “Just listen to me for a moment. I don’t like you, but I owe you. For the bullet, and – for giving me back my choices, even if it hurt. And I don’t like owing you, so I figured – ”

“Melanie.”

“So I _figured_ that after all that, the least I can do is treat you to lunch.”

Jon goes silent. There’s the sound of cloth shifting, the creak of a chair, as he leans closer, or away. It’s impossible to tell.

“You don’t have to,” he says, just like she’d been expecting, and it’s hard to say whether that tightness in her chest is fear or sympathy or just anger that he’s making her be the one to talk him into it, absolving himself when he knows her decision was already made. Maybe all of it, undifferentiated and perfectly irrelevant. 

“I know what I’m doing,” she says. “If nothing else, I could use some variety in my horrible screaming nightmares.”

“Melanie, I – ”

“Don’t you dare say you can’t when you already know you will.”

“And what do you want me to say to that?” he snaps. 

“Have you considered _thank you_?”

He laughs. It trails off into a cough, and then into nothing at all, and all she can think about is how the walls of this room swallow sound. Maybe the whole damned building feeds on pain and knowing; it’s certainly seen enough of both to sate a god.

“I’ve considered it,” he says carefully.

“And?”

She hears him draw a breath, quiet and shaky, and feels the crackle of something like a cold electric charge pass through the room and dissipate, and she isn’t expecting what he says next at all.

“You remember that study that Annabelle Cane was so pleased with? The one that claimed your decisions are made before you’re ever consciously aware of it? It’s wrong. Based on a methodological misunderstanding. People choose when they choose.”

She can feel him looking at her. She can feel the precise moment when he looks away.

“I’m not going to tell you thank you,” he says. “I’m going to tell you _no._”


End file.
